In _Adorno and the Concept of Genocide_ an international group of scholars examine the philosophical, aesthetic and political legacy of the Frankfurt School’s leading authority on life ‘after Auschwitz.’.

[T]he essays collected here... further determine the limits of experience as well as salvage something essential from that which takes place at the very limit of political and aesthetic experience. Included here are critical readings of such seminal figures as Locke, Kant, Nietzsche, Adorno, Foucault, Fanon, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou, and Rancière." -Cover.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Exception in Žižek’s ThoughtErik Vogt (bio)One cannot fail to be struck by the repeated occurrences and invocations of some logic of exception as well as by the proliferation of examples or stand-ins for exceptional positions (“Jew”; “woman”; “class struggle”) or exceptional collectives (“proletariat”; “slum dwellers”) in many of Slavoj Žižek’s writings. The significance of thinking exception is evident not only in Žižek’s powerful reconceptualization of (a supposedly outdated) ideology (...) critique and in his intriguing materialist account of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, but also in his interventions into contemporary debates as to what constitutes proper politics. For this reason, it might be appropriate, in a first sketch, to attempt to weave together some of the threads that combine into Žižek’s (critique of the) logic of exception.11The Symptom and Its Logic of ExceptionAlready Žižek’s early brilliant elaboration of a contemporary ideology critique in terms of a powerful coarticulation of Marx and Freud analyzes the “social symptom” in light of its hidden logic of exception [Sublime Object 11–53]. Since the “social symptom” is not to be grasped as some imbalance external to universality, but rather as its constitutive moment, it marks “a point of breakdown heterogeneous” to a given universal field that at the same time is “necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form” [21]. A symptomatic ideology critique will seize on the logic of exception implicit in the fissures of universality by deciphering its “falseness,” insofar “as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity” [21]. What is impossible, then, is the claim to some totality or universality without including in it “the point of exception functioning as its internal negation” [23]. This seems to suggest that the “social symptom” does not present any obstacles to its ideological-critical decipherment according to the logic of exception. However, Žižek makes clear immediately that it often does not effect the dissolution of the “social symptom”; on the contrary, it might even reinforce it, insofar as this interpretive procedure appeals to and relies on an addressee that continues to be figured in terms of consistency, completeness, totality. Consequently, this interpretive procedure of dissolving the symptom remains stuck in the very logic of exception that it attempts to unearth [73–74]. This is the reason why Žižek suggests supplementing this notion of the “social symptom” as ciphered message with the notion of fantasy. He describes the relation between symptom and fantasy in the following manner: “Symptom implies and addresses some non-barred, consistent big Other which will retroactively confer on it its meaning; fantasy implies a crossed-out, barred, non-whole, inconsistent [End Page 61] Other—that is to say, it is filling out a void in the Other” [74]. A contemporary ideology critique will therefore have to account for both the exceptional status of the social symptom and its underlying social fantasy. In other words, ideology critiques must consist of two stages, of two complementary procedures:—one is discursive, the “symptomal reading” of the ideological text [...] demonstrating how a given ideological field is a result of a montage of heterogeneous “floating signifiers,” of their totalization through the intervention of certain “nodal points”;—the other aims at extracting the kernel of enjoyment, at articulating the way in which [...] an ideology implies, manipulates, produces a pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy.[125]In short, what is required from ideology critique is an interpretation of the social symptom in such a way that it brings to light the very fundamental fantasy that, precisely as a preideological blockage to interpretation, has then to be traversed and correlated to the identification with the symptom. The social symptom has to be grasped as master signifier and as objet a. And Žižek illustrates the working of (a theory of) ideology via anti-Semitism and its construction of the “Jew.”2Briefly, anti-Semitic ideology articulates the “Jew” through a network of symbolic “overdetermination”; that is, the “Jew” becomes the point of condensation for heterogeneous and often incompatible attributes. What has to be taken into account, moreover, is the inversion... (shrink)

The main object of this paper is to examine the new philosophical frame proposed by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek and to show that it implies some traces of Sartre's philosophical and political heritage. According the project of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek one should no longer accept today's constellation of freedom, particularistic truth and democracy, but to inscribe the issues of freedom and universal truth into a political project that attempts to re-activate a thinking of revolution. Their thinking consists (...) in the wager that it is still possible to provide a philosophical frame for this leftist emancipatory position that claims the dimension of the universal against the vicious circle of capitalist globalization-cum-particularization and, by following Marx's claim that there are formal affinities between the ambitions of emancipatory politics and the working mode of capitalism, takes up the struggle of universalism against globalization. It is only through this struggle for the universal that the intertwined processes of a constant expansion of the automatism of capital and "a process of fragmentation into closed identities," accompanied by "the culturalist and relativist ideology" can be suspended. It is precisely this constellation of revolutionary act, universal truth, subject, and militant community, that reveal some similarities with Sartre's concepts of the subject, the revolutionary action, the militant community a.o. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek's fascinating and complex attempt at an appropriation of the authentic legacy of Christianity for a revivified politics of universality is traced in the light of certain affinities to concepts of Carl Schmitt's political theology. It is argued that these two thinkers not only share a similar canon of thinkers, but also an emphasis on the necessity of maintaining and/or reintroducing a distinction between friend and enemy for a properly political thought. Moreover, particular attention is paid to the way (...) the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is enacted in several of Žižek's texts. (shrink)

Although narrative models have been employed for quite some time in historiography, in sociology, and in certain psychoanalytic theories, the tendency towards narrativization has also become more dominant in reference to the positive sciences. This article presents two postmodern versions of the narrative dissolution of certain modern scientific-metaphysical concepts in the wake of the establishment of technoscience and neuroscience: Vattimo's Heideggerian account of technoscience as immanent pluralization of worlds, and Dennett's cognitivist account of the emergence of the plural self. Both (...) claim not only that former central agencies like the Cartesian cogito can be dismissed as metaphysical but that narrative pluralization entails an endorsement of liberal democracy as the only viable political model today. Employing arguments put forth by Žižek and Malabou, some of the deficiencies of this affirmative short circuit of technoscience/neuroscience with liberal-democratic politics will be examined. (shrink)

: The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: (1) that of the logician Gottlob Frege and (2) that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning (analytic philosophy and poststructuralism), (...) to show how philosophy of language can contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)